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I'm glad they're not going with Tigers.
I like the name, but I wouldn't want to use it for a farm team affiliated with a parent NHL team (especially when the parent team is in the US).

I'd rather save it for a Hamilton-only team (with no affiliations) - regardless of the sport/league.
 
Yorken Bay said:
I'm surprised they arent having a fan vote. If they really want to ingrain the team into the community like they say, weird approach to force some lame moniker on us no one associates with.

Tigers is the name it sounds like most would feel a sense if ownership for. They'd probably sell the most jerseys with that name. But I do wonder if Gary has told them to not go that route for fear of reminding everyone of how the NHL did us dirty causing people to actually boycott the NHL.
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I think they are probably choosing to leave the Tigers name for the NHL if they ever come back.

Speaking to that, this isn’t explicitly relevant to the discussion, but I have been doing some research on sports league viability and expansion in general for the past couple of years as a side project. I’m not sure if or how I am going to present this info yet, but it has yielded some interesting results. The NHL has indicated that they are only going to expand if they are able to proportionately grow the league revenue, which in essence, translates to the projected revenue of a given expansion team needing to be higher than the current median team revenue - this is something we have seen play out with Seattle and Vegas. I have done a few different projections (linear regression-based) on potential revenue and there are a handful of markets in North America under current economic conditions and exchange rate that can theoretically do this - Houston, Atlanta, Hamilton, and Phoenix are the top 4, but trade positions dependent on analysis. All of these, excluding Phoenix, are consistently within the top 10 revenue producers in the NHL based on these projections. KW is also the only other city in Canada projected to be above median, but not in the top 10, but it can also be assumed that a Hamilton team would probably capture the KW market too and possibly be at par with or jump ahead of Atlanta.
 
ericmacm said:
I think they are probably choosing to leave the Tigers name for the NHL if they ever come back.

Speaking to that, this isn’t explicitly relevant to the discussion, but I have been doing some research on sports league viability and expansion in general for the past couple of years as a side project. I’m not sure if or how I am going to present this info yet, but it has yielded some interesting results. The NHL has indicated that they are only going to expand if they are able to proportionately grow the league revenue, which in essence, translates to the projected revenue of a given expansion team needing to be higher than the current median team revenue - this is something we have seen play out with Seattle and Vegas. I have done a few different projections (linear regression-based) on potential revenue and there are a handful of markets in North America under current economic conditions and exchange rate that can theoretically do this - Houston, Atlanta, Hamilton, and Phoenix are the top 4, but trade positions dependent on analysis. All of these, excluding Phoenix, are consistently within the top 10 revenue producers in the NHL based on these projections. KW is also the only other city in Canada projected to be above median, but not in the top 10, but it can also be assumed that a Hamilton team would probably capture the KW market too and possibly be at par with or jump ahead of Atlanta.
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I'd imagine the Islanders have insight into that possibility, and if what most think is true, the NHL is highly unlikely to return, so why not back the name at least.

Your research sounds interesting, and also seems to back up what's been said over the years.

Hamilton would be a great market, Betteman even had to admit inn in court during the Balsille attempt to get the Coyotes here.

The problem has always been Hamilton is located in Canada, and worse, in proximity of the Leafs and Sabres.

The NHL and business types see it as taking a pie and cutting it into 3 pieces instead of 2, you're still getting the same total amount.

The problem with their view is they assume the size of the pie can never shrink. They're probably mostly correct, but other competing options can certainly have that effect.

They also assume a fan will always remain a fan. And they're mostly right. So they chase new fans and "new money" in potential markets like Phoenix.

The one intangible that messes up their numbers is if existing fans became ex-fans enmasse.

You can only achieve that with a boycott.

This ties into my previous comment about suppressing the Tigers history/ story.

If enough people stopped being paying leaf or Sabres fans, that would be our best chance to get the NHL to consider HAVING tob put a team here, as it would now be "new fans and money".
 
You can say the NHL would work in Hamilton (or Markham, Pefferlaw, or wherever) as much as you want, but it doesn't matter if you're not a multi-billionaire willing to buy a team and put it there.
 
SubHuman said:
You can say the NHL would work in Hamilton (or Markham, Pefferlaw, or wherever) as much as you want, but it doesn't matter if you're not a multi-billionaire willing to buy a team and put it there.
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Well...yaa, I think we all knew that.

But you need to be that and have the NHL in support.

We're sorta discussing the second part.
 
Yorken Bay said:
I'd imagine the Islanders have insight into that possibility, and if what most think is true, the NHL is highly unlikely to return, so why not back the name at least.
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I actually don't think a lot of the conventional "wisdom" on NHL Hamilton holds up anymore. A few food-for-thought points from what I have looked into:
  • The market share situation between Toronto and Buffalo shouldn't be a big concern anymore in the era of modern media. There is a much cleaner division between American and Canadian media markets these days as OTA broadcasting disappeared. The Toronto media market is officially the Toronto-Hamilton Designated Media Area (DMA) which encompasses the entire Golden Horseshoe with a TV population of ~8.8M as estimated in Numeris Data. The Buffalo DMA has a TV population of ~1.5M, but the fanbase in practice extends throughout all of WNY, which is approximately ~3.0M. Buffalo is increasingly irrelevant in this discussion because of the border and depth of their fan territory in WNY, the conflict is more with Toronto than anything. There is also the potential of a new team being able to potentially take a large share of the Kitchener-London DMA of ~2.2M people (yes, for some reason it is considered one DMA), the largest in the country to not be represented by a pro sports team.
  • The GTA and SW are not a homogeneous Leafs territory, or even perfectly split with Sabres/Red Wings. While the Leafs are certainly dominant, there are lots of other pockets of fans (Habs and Oilers are the big ones) in the peripheral GTA. You can see this roughly play out from a publicly available fan map that tracks the location of social media followers from each team. This is certainly imperfect, but probably one of the best publicly available ways to estimate this kind of information. The presence of non-Leafs fans in GTA/SW implies that there is indeed a market of fans of faraway teams that do not regularly attend games, which could theoretically be flipped into fans of a new local team that would go to games. There is also the consideration of converting Leafs fans that do not/cannot buy tickets or attend games into Hamilton fans that can buy tickets and go to games.
  • The highest valued Canadian teams (Leafs, Habs, Oilers) are within the top 5 for both revenue and valuation, and this is despite our dollar being worth $0.73 USD at the time of this post. Canadian teams are also significantly more revenue-efficient (revenue per capita) than US teams for an unquantifiable reason (probably our hockey culture), and subsequently account for 24.4% of the revenue and 31.5% of the profit, while constituting 21.8% of the league size. Based on my analysis, a team in Hamilton (as part of the Toronto-Hamilton DMA) has a revenue projection of ~$282M USD/year (average of all projection methods), which would be #8 for revenue in the league, ahead of the Capitals, and #4 for revenue in Canada, ahead of the Canucks. The projections for the other candidates (Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix) have a higher projected revenue (simply as functions of their gigantic and wealthy markets), but the spread between the estimates is significantly wider than Hamilton, which indicates that there is risk. Obviously we saw this play out in real life with the Thrashers and Coyotes, two teams that could theoretically make a lot of money that ultimately were financial failures, but the upside projections show why it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that the NHL is looking at these 3 first.
My view is that the reason we haven't seen a team in Hamilton is because there are better options for expansion elsewhere. It might not continue to be that way for very long though, especially if Atlanta/Houston happen.
 
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ericmacm said:
The market share situation between Toronto and Buffalo shouldn't be a big concern anymore in the era of modern media.
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I'm under the impression that the current issue wrt Buffalo would be siphoning off a good portion of their STH base by bringing in a Hamilton team. Something like a third (or more?) of their STHs are coming from Canada. I'm sure they'd like to prevent that for as long as they can, especially considering the declining economic nature of Upstate NY.
 
Mihairokov said:
I'm under the impression that the current issue wrt Buffalo would be siphoning off a good portion of their STH base by bringing in a Hamilton team. Something like a third (or more?) of their STHs are coming from Canada. I'm sure they'd like to prevent that for as long as they can, especially considering the declining economic nature of Upstate NY.
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I don't pretend to know the numbers, but I recall something like 15% being the purported Canada STH number for the Sabres and 30% for the Bills.

I was wondering how much the whole Canada/US tension would impact Sabres attendance, but they actually had a massive jump this season, though most of that is probably due to them having their best season in about 15 years.

This still does give me reason to believe that the Sabres, Leafs, and a Hamilton team could all co-exist.

An interesting side note is that Vancouver has put a call out for prospective owners for an MLB team there. It doesn't sound super promising, but at least they are trying. Would be nice if Hamilton could try this again, but seemingly pretty unrealistic at this point.
 
BCTed said:
An interesting side note is that Vancouver has put a call out for prospective owners for an MLB team there. It doesn't sound super promising, but at least they are trying. Would be nice if Hamilton could try this again, but seemingly pretty unrealistic at this point.
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Vancouver is approaching the MLB backwards - municipality pushing the idea and looking for investors. Sports franchises in these leagues only happen when their bids are funded by big backers (who aren't looking to skirt league rules like Balsille did).
 
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Mihairokov said:
I'm under the impression that the current issue wrt Buffalo would be siphoning off a good portion of their STH base by bringing in a Hamilton team. Something like a third (or more?) of their STHs are coming from Canada. I'm sure they'd like to prevent that for as long as they can, especially considering the declining economic nature of Upstate NY.
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It’s not actually that high anymore. The most recent non-AI source that I have been able to find is from this article, which suggests Canadians represent 7-10% of the Sabres STH population as of 2025, compared to information from the past that showed it as high as 30-40%. This is yet another element that shows Buffalo is becoming less relevant to the Hamilton discussion.

I should also clarify that WNY is not consistently defined - there is one definition that encompasses basically only the Buffalo metro (~1.5M), but there is another definition that includes the Southern Tier, Finger Lakes, and Central NY that corresponds better to the Sabres actual fan territory that includes ~3M people, which is what I have been referring to. There is certainly decline in the large urban centres, but there has still been some growth in the exurbs and cottage country.
 
The NHL seems to want about $2 billion (USD) in expansion fees. That is much less than the $7 billion to $10 billion that the NBA seemingly wants. I am not sure that either league is getting any serious bites at these prices right now.

For reference, I think Balsillie's various bids were around $200 million for a team, and he wanted the government to cover a $150 million reno of Copps.

If a prospective Hamilton ownership group were to pursue something today, we might be talking $2 billion for the base fee, maybe a $500 million surcharge for territorial indemnification, maybe a cool billion for a new arena. That brings us to $3.5 billion US or nearly $5 billion Canadian in up-front capital outlay.

Whose door can we knock on?
 
As the years pass and the franchise fee and arena (new or renovation) costs exponentially increase, the odds of an NHL team in Hamilton become even more miniscule.

The only chance Hamilton has at getting an NHL team is if the league collapses to a point where half the fanbase is lost and the league is in financial trouble and a number of teams are on the verge of folding.
So basically, don't hold your breath.

I find it annoying that Canadians are helping support Buffalo's teams - basically keeping them propped up. Buffalo will get in the way of an NHL team in Hamilton, and an NFL team in Toronto - but still expect us to help keep their teams alive.

In any case, I no longer care about us getting an NHL team. Not interested.
 
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